


The Wild Hunt

by notmanos



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Demon Bar, Road Trip, Triffids, damn fairies, drama queen, giant, redneck werewolves, so much cursing, swamps smell terrible
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-11-05 12:07:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17918525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notmanos/pseuds/notmanos
Summary: Demon possessed Dean takes a detour on his road trip with Crowley, and goes solo on his search for a near mythical contest held by fairies, for possession of a powerful, evil book.  He meets up with a witch on a revenge trip, and they decide to take on the "wild hunt" together. But since when do fairies play fair?





	The Wild Hunt

_ 1 - Who Are You This Time _

Destiny sighed when she heard the door chime, as it was really too late for a customer. But then she saw him, and changed her mind.

He was easily the handsomest man she’d ever seen in person. He had a male model jaw and green eyes, and while his dark brown hair was cut a little short for her taste, it would always grow out.

She gave him her best smile, and he responded with one of his own, one that probably made panties drop all along the Eastern seaboard. Even knowing that, she still wanted to bang him. “You’re Madame Destiny?” he said, his smile making his eyes sparkle. “I was expecting an old woman with a heavy shawl and a facial wart with one hair growing out of it.”

“Most people do,” she admitted. She liked to keep it that way. It kept out the creepers.

Since he was already seated at the table, she sat down, and produced a purple velvet bag with her tarot cards inside it. “So what can I and the cards do for you, handsome?”

“Call me Dean,” he said, sitting back casually. “I’ve heard you’re a genuine psychic, and I’d like to test that.”

She shuffled her cards. “And how do you intend to do that?”

“I was thinking maybe you could tell me something about myself.”

Doable, but she couldn’t help but think it wasn’t much of a test, unless there was something unique about him. After shuffling three times, she set the cards in front of him, and he proved he was a pro at this by cutting the deck without being asked. She shuffled the cards one more time, and then did an entry level five card spread in front of him, putting the rest of the deck aside. Destiny got ready to do her usual patter, which she could recite in her sleep, but the words died in her throat as soon as she saw the cards she put in front of him.

The Tower, in all its deadly glory, withe two people plunging off the flaming parapets. The Ten of Swords, all rammed into a dead man’s back. The Hanged Man, but upside down, so it looked like he was bound while doing a difficult yoga pose. Death, reversed, so you could hardly see the skeletal figure astride his white horse. And, wrapping it all up, The Devil himself, lording over all.

It took the breath from her lungs as sure as a punch. She looked between the handsome, smiling man, and the carnage of the cards before him, and it felt like one of those pictures, where one thing is wrong, but it’s so crucial, the image makes no sense.

“It’s that bad, huh?” he said cheerfully.

Destiny breathed in through her nose and out her mouth, calming herself down, because the urge to run screaming from the room was almost overwhelming. This was the ugliest spread she had ever dealt. “This is ... Hell. You’ve been to Hell.”

He sat forward, eyes widening in surprise. “Yes! Now prove that wasn’t a lucky guess.”

He was still reacting as if this was a jolly good jape, which made her stomach curdle. He was pretty poison. Handsome, yes, but rotten at the core. “You’ve been witness to and a participant in disasters of a near cosmic scale. You’ve ... you’ve died more than once. How is that possible?”

He slapped the table, and she jumped. “Hot damn, you are the real thing. I was beginning to get worried you’d all shriveled up and blown away.”

“You’ve fought the Devil.”

“Lucifer? Yeah. Total puss. All hat and no cattle, if you know what I mean.”

Destiny got impressions from the cards. To most people, they were simply colorful totems spelling out a very general narrative. But for her abilities, they were a kind of gateway drug. Every card had a specific story to tell, and they all flashed by like brief movies, tiny windows into other people’s lives. And what pretty poison’s life had been was jarring and confusing. “I don’t ... I don’t understand this. You were a hero, and you were a killer. You sacrificed everything to save the world, and you died broken and beloved by an angel. But now, you’re ...”

He put his elbows on the table, and held his face in his hands, like he was trying to be coquettish. It was really creepy, and he knew it. “Oh, go on. I know you want to say it.”

She would have run from the room if she thought she had a chance, but the cards were letting her know that if he wanted to kill her, she couldn’t stop him. The Ten of Swords was him before this, and might be her right now. “Demon.”

He smirked, and his jade eyes briefly flashed black. “Bingo, baby. And not just any old demon either. What makes me special?”

Destiny had never been one to try and predict her own date and manner of death, even though it wasn’t out of her range of abilities. She now wished she had. “The Mark of Cain.”

“Yahtzee! You, my dear, get a prize. Which is, I will leave your place, and leave you safe and sound, and never return. If you answer one more question for me.”

The funny thing? He wasn’t lying. She understood he was totally sincere about this. And about the unspoken threat that if he didn’t like her response, he was going to kill her. “What?”

“Where is the Wild Hunt?”

For a moment, Destiny didn’t understand the question. “The myth? I think it’s ... Norse, right? Or maybe German ...”

“No, not the mythical one. The real one.”

It took her a moment, but it finally clicked into place. “Oh, you mean that Wild Hunt.” She scooped up the cards in front of him, and shuffled them back into the deck before laying out three cards in front of her. This time, it was The Nine of Swords, with its weeping woman with swords in the wall above her; the King of Pentacles reversed, brooding on his throne; and The Hermit with his lantern. She knew very little about the Hunt, besides rumors, but the cards crystallized it for her. It happened every one hundred years, in a shifting location. The “winner” of the Hunt would gain the Blackfield Codex, supposedly one of the most dangerous volumes of black magic outside of the Book of the Damned. It had been held for many centuries; no being had ever won it. It was a buzz saw of death; a veritable supernatural meat grinder. If this asshole wanted to throw himself into the jaws of death, she’d be more than happy to give him directions.

But Destiny worried. Because there was The Hermit, letting her know he might actually survive this. A creature like him getting his hands on the book would be bad news for the world, and yet, she wasn’t sure he actually wanted it. Who was the King of Pentacles? And why was he so upset?

If it was a choice between saving her life or saving the world’s, she knew she had to save the world. And yet, if she didn’t tell him, he would get this information from someone else. Destiny was slightly ashamed of herself, but her urge to live was too strong. “At midnight of the twenty first, the doorway to the Hunt will be open for ten minutes in Ensenada, on a beach called the Red Reach. If you die, you will be trapped there.”

Dean nodded, sitting forward. “It’s what, some kind of pocket dimension?”

“Within the faerie realm, I believe, but don’t quote me.”

“Ugh, faeries,” he said, rolling his eyes in disgust.

Destiny could only shrug. She’d heard nothing good about them, but had no personal experience. “That’s all I can tell you. The cards aren’t giving me anything else.”

“That’s enough,” he said, standing up. Part of her worried he was going to kill her anyway. You couldn’t trust demons. The fact that you could trust the man he was before had no bearing on the present day. He grinned at her, all teeth and confidence. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. You did good. Now, if you’re lying, I’ll come back and things won’t be so pleasant.”

“I’m not lying.” She wouldn’t dare. She could still see the Ten of Swords in her mind’s eye. How he was, and how she could be. She was curious who murdered him, but the cards didn’t reveal that.

He nodded, still smiling, but she could see how sinister it was now, and how much of the smile in his eyes had drained away. Now he had the eyes of a predator. “Good choice on your part. I’ll guess we’ll see, won’t we?” She held her breath until he reached the exit, but he paused in the doorway, making her hold it in longer .“If I never see you again, have a nice life.” He threw her a wink that he may have thought was charming, and left.

Destiny started breathing again, and made herself do it normally, so she didn’t hyperventilate. She was adding a devil’s trap to the floor. No more demons, pretty or not.

She quickly shuffled the cards, and did a small reading for herself. She wanted to know if she was ever seeing this guy again, in defiance of what he said.

The card she pulled for herself was the Two of Pentacles. She stared at the card, slightly baffled by the scenes she saw. He wasn’t lying, but she would see him again. As a human.

How? The card had no answers for that.

_ 2 - Underground _

Human Dean had never been to Ensenada, which seemed weird to Dean as he was now. He’d been to Baja, he’d been to Mexico. Why not here? Sure, it was a little tourist trap beach and commerce community, but it still seemed like an oversight on his part. He could totally see human Dean coming here for cheap drugs to make himself numb, and strip shows to make him feel briefly and temporarily alive, and not so desperately alone.

Man, what a sorry sack of shit human Dean was. Dean was glad he was no longer like that.

Scuttlebutt had that there was a demon friendly bar near the beach, Mano Derecha Roja, but it was hidden, so hunters or drunk frat bros didn’t crash the party. Dean wasn’t sure how they managed that, but he saw a demon sigil written in ink that no human could see written on the side of a building, and followed it. It was only arrows, so he followed their directions to what appeared to be the back alley of a touristy bar, with an overflowing Dumpster full of disgusting looking trash. But what tipped it all off for Dean was the lack of seagulls. Those flying rats were everywhere, and would have picked this thing clean of everything but wrappers ... if it was completely real, or not marked by the demonic, which could make animals nervous. There was a demonic message on the wall, hidden beneath tagged graffiti. Finally, it said something:  _ Move the Dumpster. _

He did, pushing it aside with a minor shove. Being stronger than a human had perks too. There was a hidden door, also tagged with more graffiti, but this was demonic graffiti, with notes about certain monsters in town, and rumors about hunters. What Dean and his annoying anchor of a little brother had never really bothered to investigate was the demon underground. Every marginalized group within society created their own space to hang out in, and why would demons be any different? Okay, they weren’t human, but still. It should have been a no brainer.

The door led to a small hallway that seemed to angle gradually downward, and he could hear the thump of music from the human bar fade away as he closed in on another door, this one painted black, with a large peephole in the center. Demon graffiti written on it said only  _knock.  _He did.

The peephole window opened, and a gruff male voice said, “Let’s see it.”

Dean was briefly tempted to take his dick out, but because the peephole was at eye level, he knew what he actually wanted to see. He flashed his black eyes, and the peephole closed. There was a brief rattle of locks before the door was thrown open. “Welcome, brother,” the demon bouncer said.

The bar was dimly lit, like any other bar, but it was illuminated with mood lighting, gel spots and Christmas lights, and the occasional neon cactus, proving demons could be as tacky as humans. There were booths and a polished bar with leather stools, but, noticeably, no mirrors behind the bar, out of a kindness for some of the monster patrons.

Dean took a seat at the bar, and waited for the non-binary bartender to wander down his way. They had a Mohawk and a kilt, but while they looked rugged, they also wore blue lipstick, and a diamond nose stud. Hard to say what the base gender was, and he didn’t care. “Whiskey neat,” he said, not expecting anything decent. Demon bars usually didn’t have regular liquor deliveries, as that would give them away to anal retentive hunters, so it was pretty much catch as catch can.

He glanced around, wondering if everyone was here to take part in the Hunt. The fact that only a genuine psychic could point you in the right direction was a way of weeding out the amateurs, although the fact that if you died in the realm you stayed there also weeded out those who weren’t ready to spend eternity in a faerie hellscape, which sounded like its own special kind of punishment. Which was why Dean was not going to die, and he was going to win.

Now that he was a demon, he realized demons had a few more senses than humans, who were on the limited spectrum. And by smell alone, he could identify all the monsters in the bar.

For instance, there was a curvaceous Asian woman alone in a back booth, one he might like to buy a drink. But from the smell of mold she gave off, he knew she was a wraith. And there was a guy at the end of the bar, a good looking Latino he also wouldn’t have minded buying a drink for, but he had the rotted meat smell of a ghoul. The rank smell of wet dog told him the couple who were getting handsy in a side booth were werewolves. Everybody had their own reason for wanting the Codex, but he honestly wondered if they even knew what they’d do with it if they got their clumsy mitts on it.

Dean was sipping his whiskey, cringing slightly since it was the cheaper, harder stuff, when a beautiful Latina woman took the stool beside his. She wore jeans and steel toed boots, and a black leather jacket that hid her figure more than accentuated it. She had a short, asymmetrical haircut, but her purple hair still looked as shiny as a panther’s pelt. She gazed at him with whiskey colored eyes, and said, “The energy aura you’re giving off is insane.”

“Is it?” he responded.

“It’s like lava, all heat and rage. What are you?”

“I’m a demon.”

She shook her head, making her necklaces rattle. Most were hidden beneath her The Smiths t-shirt, but the one currently visible for all to see was a pentagram. That seemed a bit hostile in a demon bar. “Not a normal one you ain’t.”

Dean sighed, put down his glass, and pushed up the sleeve of his jacket, revealing the red mark on his arm. “Mark of Cain, bruja. Satisfied?”

“Bruja? That’s a bit stereotyping, isn’t it?”

“Except all witches smell like blood and aniseed, bruja.” He gave her an insincere smile before picking up his glass and taking a gulp of rotgut.

She sighed, conceding the point. “Funny, you don’t look like Cain.”

“And you don’t like a crone, but here we are.”

“So, salty and dangerous. If I had the stomach for men, I might just sleep with you.”

His smile this time was more sincere. “And if I was drunker, I just might sleep with you.”

She played with the swizzle stick in her drink. It was a vodka tonic, heavy on the tonic. It was unclear if that was a choice of hers, or if bar policy was watering down drinks at any given opportunity. “This is a nice moment we’re having. You’re here for the Hunt, aren’t you?”

“What Hunt?”

“Oh please, diablo. Save it for the tourists.”

Dean eyed her, thinking of all the ways he could kill her without getting up from his seat. Forty eight? No, forty nine. “You have a minute to tell me what this is all about.”

“Or what?”

“Or I show you what the Mark of Cain can really do.” Admittedly, that was a lame sounding threat, but if she was as smart as she seemed to think she was, she’d know it wasn’t.

Her eyes widened. Good, she did know a few things. “Listen, all of these assholes in here are chumps. I’d be surprised if they last ten minutes. But you? You reek of blood and death. You’re a solid bet for the win.”

“Damn right I am.”

“I want a spell in the Codex. I’ll make you a deal. Let me have that page, and I will pay you fifty thousand dollars.”

The human Dean probably would have done a spit take dramatic enough to coat this whole bar in whiskey. But he wasn’t human, so he didn’t. “Lady, I’m a demon. I don’t give a fuck about money.”

“I’m an alchemist. On the other side, that’s useful.”

“How?”

“The faeries won’t let anyone take iron or silver over, in case you want to use it against them. I can make them on sight.”

Dean shook his head. “I have a weapon that kills everything.” Admittedly, he hadn’t tried it on a fairy yet, but it channeled the power of the Mark. He should be able to kill God with it, if he/she actually existed anymore.

She sighed in frustration. “Is there anything you want?” She grimaced after saying this, probably because she thought she was opening herself up to possible sexual abuse.

Gross. Between his pretty face and the dangerous aura the Mark of Cain gave him, Dean always had his pick of any woman - or man - he wanted. He could go into any bar in town, ask, “Who wants to fuck me?” and get a surprisingly long line of volunteers. Why would someone want to have sex with someone who wasn’t into it anyway? Way too much work and mental compartmentalization. It’d be no fun at all.“Tell me why you want this spell.”

She sighed, and looked down into her drink. “To kill someone. It’s an instant death spell that shouldn’t rebound on me.”

“Aren’t there already death spells?”

“Yes, but most of them have steep costs, and on top of that, I’d need to cast about a hundred before I even got close to hurting this fucking brujo. He’s loaded himself up with all sorts of protection spells, charms, and artifacts. It’d take me twenty years to get through all of them.”

Dean considered that. He didn’t think she was lying. “So this is a revenge trip for you? You want one page out of the entire codex just to off some guy?”

“Yes. I know how fucking stupid it sounds -“

“Deal.”

She did a double take of her own. “What?”

“You gotta deal. What’s one page?”

“Are you serious?”

“If I was joking, sweetheart, you’d know.” He swigged down the last of his rotgut, and wondered why demon bars couldn’t ever get their distribution issues worked out. If they ever had better stuff, he’d never venture into human bars again. “Know of any decent human bars around here that aren’t too touristy?”

She seemed surprised by the conversational shift, but rolled with it. “Ernesto’s is pretty decent. Why?”

“I need a good glass of whiskey before we head into fairy land,” he said, standing up and throwing some cash on the bar.

“Oh, what? I’m your tour guide now?”

“It’s a small price to pay for a foolproof death spell, isn’t it?”

She scowled, but couldn’t argue the point.

No good ever came of making deals with demons. She should have known that by now.

_ 3 - Dirt In The Ground _

__

The bruja’s name was Emma, or so she said it was. Dean didn’t know if it was a lie or not, and didn’t care. She could live whatever life she wanted. He didn’t press her for details on this brujo in her cross hairs either. She might tell him eventually, might not, no sweat off his balls.

Ernesto’s was okay - it was a little touristy, but that might be impossible to avoid so close to the beach. Emma also knew where Red Reach was, and said it got its name from some tidal condition or some such thing. Honestly he wasn’t paying attention. The whiskey was only okay, but still better than the stuff they served in the demon bar.

Quarter to midnight, they were out on the beach with maybe a dozen others. He recognized the wraith, the ghoul, and the werewolves from the demon bar, and there were a couple other demons here as well, eying him like he was human Dean and about to spoil their fun. Whatever.

The fairy who met them all there was human looking, although she smelled like hydrogen peroxide and dust, which was weirdly what “light” fairies smelled like. Dark ones usually smelled like rust and silicone. She looked like Lisa Bonet circa Angel Heart, and Dean was really good with that. Had he ever slept with a fairy? He didn’t think so, and it would be a nice challenge, but then again, he bet they were into some really freaky shit. The ones who seemed most innocent usually were. But he bet dark fairies were as fun as hell, assuming they didn’t kill you during the act. They were probably like black widow spiders, though. Mate and kill.

To scan you, the fairy simply held up her hand. There wasn’t even a light or anything, but she caught the wraith trying to sneak in a silver knife, meaning it was working. Of course, he came through the scan fine, because the only weapon he currently had on him was the First Blade, and that was made of bones and unholy rage - not what they were scanning for. Emma came up clean too. But if she was a witch with genuine skill, she was her own weapon, much like him.

Once everybody was scanned, the good fairy told them, “You will know the end of the world when you come to it. There is no turning back from this point. If you want to leave, do it now.” Everyone looked around, but no one left. They didn’t jump through all these fucking hoops to give up last second. The fairy then snapped her fingers, and a light suddenly erupted over them, so bright you could see it through your lids when you closed your eyes.

When the darkness flooded in, Dean assumed he’d been blinded, but the area smelled different, and the ground felt weird under his feet. He opened his eyes to find himself somewhere far from Ensenada.

He appeared to be in some sort of swamp, with weeping trees made of lush branches, and muddy ground that reeked of algae. Dean thought he was here alone, but in the shadow of the closest tree he saw Emma, still trying to get her bearings. The fairies must have known they were in this together somehow.

Fucking fairies. Always gave him the creeps.

It was night here ... maybe. It was dark and shadowy, and while there were stars in the sky, they were wrong. For one thing, they were pale blue, and he could see no moon at all. He recognized no constellations, and knew, if he had enough time to kill, he might make up his own. Like that cluster off to the right? That was the constellation Dildo. And the one in the upper left was the constellation Barf. This was astronomy he could get behind.

He and Emma were on what passed for dry ground here. A few feet ahead, the dirt turned decidedly liquid, and water plants peeked their heads from beneath the surface. The trees around them looked like an odd combination of a weeping willow and a black chestnut, with trunks as big around as the bodies of small cars, and branches as thick as men. You probably needed big ass chainsaws to bring one of these sons of bitches down.

“So what now?” Dean asked. “You know?”

Emma stared at him in what he took to be disbelief. “You came here, and you don’t even know what this is about?” Dean shrugged, and her upper lip curled in disgust. “The name’s the giveaway. It’s a hunt.”

“Cool. What’re we hunting?”

“No, you asshole. We’re being hunted. We have to survive to reach the end.”

He smiled. It was genuine, and now that his eyes had adjusted to the dim illumination, he could see her shock at seeing it. What, she didn’t like his real smile? His angry, gleeful, bloodthirsty smile? “Even better. When do they release the hounds?”

The swamp started bubbling, like someone had heated the mud to boiling, but then figures started to emerge. They almost looked like cartoon characters at first, with wide shoulders and a rounded head like a hump in the middle, dripping slimy mud. But when their eyes opened - all three of them - in a line across their foreheads, they glowed with their own orange light, illuminating otherwise featureless faces, and huge, gaping mouths full of teeth as big around as beer cans. They were astonishingly ugly, and smelled like skunk cabbage. As they emerged from the swamp, they were - what? Seven feet tall, heading towards eight? And right now, there were five of them.

Dean’s grin became ferocious, and he pulled out the First Blade, which he would swear sung to him. Not audibly, not in a way anyone else would notice, but he could feel it in his blood. It was hungry, and eager to feed. “If you wanna hide, I got these,” he told her.

“Fuck you, I can hold my own,” she said, and grabbed a slender branch, breaking it off the tree. He was about to ask her if she intended to spank them with a switch, when he heard her saying something under her breath - sounded Spanish, but he couldn’t catch it - and the branch turned from wood to silver in her hands. Cute trick.

“Isn’t that transformation rather than alchemy?”

She glared at him. “Don’t nitpick my gifts, asshole.”

Dean snickered. She was a terrible travel partner. He was glad he brought her along. She’d be great cannon fodder if he needed it.

Because he was closest, the swamp monsters went for him first, and Dean happily waited for them to make the first move, to see how stupid they were. His guess was very, but he wanted confirmation.

He got it. Two attacked him at once, swooping their huge, muddy arms at him, and Dean ducked underneath and slashed, opening up a gash in the midsection of the one on his right. It weeped liquid, something black that smelled like bile, but was probably their blood.

The one on the right roared in pain and staggered back, and while the one on the left lunged for him, Dean slashed up, and cut open its weird, muppety face. The blade was singing something like an aria now, something clear and high and joyful, as Dean could feel the power diffusing through him. Their pain was his gain.

Although the slashes hurt them, they showed no sign of dying, so Dean kept stabbing, like he was Norman Bates, and they were blondes in the shower. Their weird mud bodies and gloopy blood constantly threatened to clot, but the First Blade burned, and the wounds could never quite close.

Dean stabbed and cut until they were melting, spilling back into the swamp they came from, and he turned his attention on a third, deciding to carve his name into it like it was a park bench. The thing roared and swatted at him, but their overwhelming size made them slow, and Dean found it easy to dodge. When that one started to melt back into the mud, he was disappointed. Not bloody enough. He wanted more.

There was only one left, and it was still fighting Emma. She was damaging it with her silver riding crop, but it was a slow death by poison. She’d killed one, but Dean could still see its head melting slowly back into the swamp.

Dean lunged forward and cut a huge X in its back. It roared and lashed out with an appendage, and Dean met it with a counter slash, slicing its arm off at what would have been its elbow, if it had one. Emma slashed it across the face with her silver weapon, and it started dissolving in huge chunks, that Dean happily sliced down to size. In no time at all, they were out of opponents to kill.

She looked at him, and then at the First Blade, which she stared at in horror. “What the hell is that?”

“The First Blade. The weapon that can kill anything.”

“It looks like bone.”

“It is. It’s why the fairy couldn’t detect it.”

She kept staring at it like a fascinating new monster. “I’ve never seen an inanimate object with its own aura before. It’s ... black. Except when you were using it, then it was red ... like yours. It’s a part of you, isn’t it?”

“I’m the flesh, and it is the will.”

“Jesus. I’m starting to think I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

He slid the blade - still hungry, but content for now - back in its sheath, but he could still feel it in his blood, hear its clarion call in his mind. “What, you think I can’t win?”

“I know you can win. I just don’t know if you’re letting me survive it.”

Dean grinned at her, impressed by her perspicacity. “I’m inclined to give my word. But don’t make yourself expendable, and we’ll all get through this alive.”

Emma shuddered, and closed her eyes tight for a few seconds. When she opened them, he saw a faint golden glow within the iris of her left eye. “I’m not without my own resources. Don’t push me.”

He smirked at her, feeling the change in her energy. It was wild, dangerous ... and kind of a turn on. Too bad she wasn’t into dudes. “You have an actual evil eye? Fucking A, that’s cool. Why couldn’t you kill the brujo with that?”

The glow faded. “He’s immune to it. Believe me, I tried.”

Dean wondered who this guy was, and if he could possibly meet the paranoid asshole who hid himself behind so many protective charms, that wouldn’t do a damn bit of good when he slid the Blade into his gut. But he was getting far ahead of himself, and she was probably the kind of witch who held a grudge about other people killing her enemies.

Dean gestured at the swamp. “Is shit monsters gonna be all they throw at us? ‘Cause I gotta admit, I’m really disappointed.”

“If I understand it correctly, we’ll be hunted by all sorts of fairies. We shouldn’t get too comfortable, because they can come from all over.”

“Good. I’m hungry.” He said, searching for a dryer stretch of land. It seemed to stretch on into a thicker stand of trees, a forest where the trees all had gigantism, and the shadows were a single large clot of darkness.

“I really wish you meant you were hungry for food,” she said, following him.

It was kind of nice having a battle partner who really understood him. If Sam were here, he’d tell him that. He might gut him after, but only once the words had really sunk in and hurt.

_ 5- The Earth Died Screaming _

The smell of the swamp faded the farther they went into the forest, and Dean found the huge trees with their weeping, bone like branches kind of fascinating. They were like plants that had grown up around the skeletons of titans, giants that had somehow died on their feet. He wouldn’t put it past these freaky fuckers to have done just that.

At first, he thought it was simply the wind gasping through the trees, a sound of voices whispering in another room, but then goose bumps erupted along his spine, and the Mark began to throb. Something major was heading their way, and Dean couldn’t help but grin. Finally something good to put a little spice in the evening.

There was a huge boom that made the ground shake, and his first thought - that it was an explosion - disappeared when there was a second boom sending black needles and broken branches snowing down from the trees. Emma cringed and he could see her evil eye was returning, perhaps called by the same power that was calling the Mark. “What the fuck ..?”

Another boom and now, those pinprick blue stars were blotted out by ... something.

He’d been hoping for Godzilla, but it wasn’t Godzilla. It was a thirty two foot tall vaguely human looking skeleton covered with what looked like rotting flesh and seaweed. It smelled kind of like a tire fire in a septic tank. It was so disgusting and nonsensical it actually made him laugh.

The visual wasn’t much better. The rotting flesh, which appeared to be gray, was draped loosely over the giant skeleton, like it got a poorly fitting flesh suit off the rack. The seaweed was black and oily, and tangled around the thing like it had walked into a big, wet spider web on its way here. Ooh - did that mean there was a big spider around the corner? He always wanted to kill one of those.

How a skeleton with no tendons, musculature, or tight fitting skin could still be intact was another reminder they were in a realm where physics didn’t apply. Or sense. He wondered if he could take advantage of that. Probably not. The fairies probably hoarded all the good stuff for themselves.

Its foot came down, and so did a couple of those absurdly thick trees, which shattered into kindling. The bones looked as big around as water park slides, and it only had two gaping eye sockets that looked like caves. Somehow its jaw was intact and capable of opening, but the only noise that came from it was a huge, gasping sigh, like the wind through the trees. Somehow that was the creepiest thing.

The throbbing of the Mark told him this was a dark fairy - possibly the biggest motherfucking one of them. How did you even begin to kill it? Also, would it even notice the First Blade, presuming he could somehow shove it into one of the bones? Well, there was no time to find out like the present, huh?

Dean ran towards the giant monster zombie, much to Emma’s audible shock, and when the foot slammed down on the ground again, he jumped for it, leading with the First Blade.

The bones of the thing felt like marble reinforced with concrete; something cold, hard, and dense. He stabbed down, but the Blade glanced off the bone. Dean took it in both hands and plunged down the knife with all his strength, the power infusing his muscles and blood.

The tip of the blade made a slight dent. A nick of bone, a piece no bigger than his pinkie nail, broke off. And the skeleton didn’t seem to notice him, judging by how it raised its foot, and Dean had to hang on as it took him for an inadvertent ride. “How do we hurt it?” he heard Emma shout, as the Mark continued to pulse and burn, making his blood feel like acid.

There had to be a connection, a reason this thing was calling out to the Mark and her evil eye. It wasn’t coincidence, or the proximity to such an evil spirit. “Turn your eye on it,” he shouted. “We have to coordinate an attack.” He didn’t actually know that - he was guessing. But he felt like it was a good guess.

Dean assumed she’d turned her eye on it. All he could see from his vantage point on the skeletal foot was a pale glow in the dark of the woods, and to prove it must have been having some effect, the skeletal monster started reaching for Emma. Dean crouched, and when the hand was low enough, he jumped for it, grabbing on to thumb bone and just barely hanging on. It closed around him like he expected, and began the journey towards its face.

“Gonna eat me, big bad giant?” he yelled, and laughed, because he bet that was exactly what it was trying to do. Did all lame ass monsters pull from the same goddamn play book? As a demon, he was personally offended to be grouped with these punk ass bitch monsters. If they ever had an original thought in their empty heads, everyone would have died of shock.

Dean waited until he was close to its massive skull before squirming out of its grasp, and jumping into its eye socket. It looked like empty darkness, but it wasn’t. Dean stabbed into the black, using the Blade to chop away at the meat and blood hidden in the darkness. He could feel an odd sensation, like fire ants inside his skin, and had to assume that was Emma’s evil eye.

Now the thing was making a noise, like a stuttering  _tk tk tk  _ , and a shadow fell over him, as the skeleton’s hand was back, seeking to pluck him out.

Dean wasn’t about to allow that to happen. He’d found the weak spot, and he wasn’t letting up. He hacked a big enough hole and punched through, ripping out hunks of black, rancid flesh, tunneling towards the brain or whatever it had that passed for it. Hell, its brain could be in its ass for all he knew. He just wanted to hurt it.

It must have done the trick, because gravity shifted, and he was aware the giant zombie was falling a split second before it hit the ground, so hard that Dean genuinely felt it. He was briefly bounced around inside the hole of blood and meat he’d carved through its eye socket, and while it was slightly cushioning, it was more gross than anything else. The world’s most disgusting car crash.

Dean climbed out, having to dig into the flesh with his feet, hands, and Blade to scale back up, only to find it was smoking, the skin sizzling like bacon, but smelling like someone’s boiling, rancid jockstrap. Emma was standing in the shadow of one of those gigantic trees, but only her glowing evil eye was visible - and was exactly what was cooking this thing.

Dean scrambled to a lower elevation, feeling the skeleton heat up beneath his boots like it was a stove, and he dove off as soon as he could, hitting the ground and rolling. Once he was back on his feet, he flicked the zombie blood off of the Blade and holstered it, still hearing its song in his mind as clear as a crystal chime.

By the time he joined her, all the mottled, rotted skin had burned away, and the skeleton itself was glowing as orange as a smoldering ember. Dean wondered if the woods would catch fire, but, again, that was in the real world. Who knew what would happen in this place? Maybe it would cause a hurricane, or make asphalt spontaneously develop.

He stood beside her as the skeleton’s bones finally crumbled, turning to glowing shards that dissolved to ash as soon as they hit the dirt. She sighed and leaned against the tree trunk like she might fall over. “So that’s what an evil eye does, huh?” he asked.

“Not really. Back in our world, it lets me curse people, kill their souls if I really pour it on. Cooking’s new.”

“There’s no curse that causes spontaneous combustion?”

“Well, yeah. But it’s too showy. I prefer quietly devastating.” She wiped sweat off her forehead, and gave him some very skeptical side eye. “So that’s the Mark’s trick, huh? Stabbing everything?”

He smiled. “Oh, I’m the best at killing. The knife’s nice, but I don’t have to use it.”

“Well, that’s a nice and creepy answer.”

There was a far off wolf howl, and it made her nervously scan the horizon. “I guess we’re still not the only survivors.”

“For now,” Dean said, grinning. “Think you can work your magic and make us a couple of silver stakes?”

She sighed, and looked around for suitable branches. “That’s literally the easiest thing I can do.” She found one that was somewhere in size between a spear and a bo staff, broke it in half over her knee, and spun both in her hands. She was muttering a spell he couldn’t make out. They both seemed to grow silver skins, and when they were done she tossed one to him. He caught it easily, and realized it had a silver heft to it. It wasn’t this heavy as wood.

Dean did a couple of practice swings, imaging all the damage he could do with this. It was a heavy club. It’d smash skulls as easily as piercing a werewolf’s heart. He was aware she was staring at him out of the corner of her eye, probably wondering how he might try to kill her, if he did. He hoped he was never that predictable.

They walked on, and the trees shrunk to a more reasonable size, while the ground became a little harder to traverse. It was starting to get clogged up with sticky vines, green and gold, that seemed to threaten to tangle their feet. Dean considered lighting it all on fire. Would it burn? Or was it made of fairy asbestos or something?

“What was he like?” Emma asked. She’d taken to whacking the vines with her silver stake. It didn’t seem super effective.

“What was who like?”

“The guy you used to be. Or ... wait, are you possessing him? Is he still in there?”

“No, he’s dead. He was a putz.”

“I heard rumors he was some big ass hunter.”

Dean snorted derisively. “He was a fucked up mess. He raised his brother like he was his own son, made excuses for an emotionally and often physically distant father who preferred his brother over him no matter how much he sacrificed, got sent to Hell, got rescued by angels, hated angels, and yet, the truest love of his life is a male angel, which he never really dealt with. He saved the world, endangered the world, was a complete martyr and died trying to save it again. The funny thing is - who cares? Maybe his lovelorn angel, and possibly his brother, who has his own issues, but nobody really misses poor old Dean Winchester. He only wanted to be loved, but no one hated him more than he did. The end.”

Emma stopped and looked back at him. “Dude, that’s ... that’s so sad.”

Dean shook his head. “It’s not. It’s pathetic. If I was him, I’d have killed myself ages ago. Well, after killing his asshole Dad. That fucker was mentally abusive, and Dean knew it. So what did he fucking do? Just take it, and protect Sam as much as he could. What a stupid asshole. Dean should have just killed Daddy dearest himself, and saved himself a fuckload of pain. He deserved all the shit he got.”

“Wow. You’re a real dick, aren’t you?”

“I’m a demon, so yeah.”

She shook her head, clearly thinking he was the asshole. Not that he gave a shit about her opinion, or anyone else’s for that matter. They continued to struggle their way through the ground cover for a minute or so before she halted and held a hand up, before briefly putting a finger to her lips. Dean cocked his head, and listened for what she must have heard.

He almost accused of her of just trying to shut him up, when he heard ... something. It was a weird sound, and faint, like a small breeze blowing over a field of tiny bells. But it was getting slightly louder. Closer? What the hell was that?

  
Dean pictured a sleigh full of mice pulling a rat in a Santa suit, but then he saw a cloud of light approaching fast from the Northeast. What the hell was that?

As soon as he figured it out, it was too late. Human Dean had had a past encounter with these types of fairies, which he mentally dubbed “Twinks”, which was funny on a couple of different levels, especially since Dean was unaware of the gay connotation of that until a bit later. (Still didn’t change the name of them, though.) They were tiny fairies who glowed, and, in spite of their diminutive size, could do a hell of a lot of damage, because, showing how fucked up everything fairy was, they punched way above their weight.

They swarmed in like a bunch of bright, jingling locust, and Dean felt tiny jabs along with more physical hits, and realized these fucking twinks had weapons. Something with a blade. The sting that followed after suggested a kind of poison as well.

Dean pulled out his Blade and lashed out, slicing several of the twinks as they slashed him in turn, but most of them flew off before he could do major damage. He’d managed to chop a couple in half, catch a few random limbs, but he had no idea if it was enough to kill them. You’d think so, but with fairies, you could never take it for granted.

  
“What the fuck ..?” Emma snapped, touching her face. It looked like she had little paper cuts all over, barely bleeding, but he bet they stung. The ones he could see now on his own arms were the same, and although the pain was negligible, it was still completely fucking annoying.

“Time to whip out the iron, I think,” he told her. Were the twinks light fairies or dark? Oh man, was that a poser. He really didn’t care either way, as long as they killed a lot of these little glowing bastards.

They came around again, a swarm of bell chimes and light, but even as he braced for it, Dean thought he heard something else. Was it a crunch, something broken underfoot? As he turned to look, he felt a sharp sting in his neck. He thought it was one of those fucking twinks, but when he reached up, he found a dart sticking into the side of his neck. He pulled it out, and sniffed the end. Whatever it was, it smelled like a mild poison. “Oh, you motherfuckers,” he slurred, before he lost all feeling in his legs and slammed down into the dirt and binding weeds.

  
When he came to and figured out who did this, they were all going to die horribly.

_ 6 - Body For The Pile _

The first thing Dean heard when he came to was crackling, as if from a fire, and the smell of wood smoke that followed after guaranteed that was indeed what he was picking up. He took a peek from beneath narrowed eyelids, but it turned out the caution was unwarranted. The two people currently around the fire had their backs to him.

He knew exactly who they were too. Because you know what he smelled underneath the smoke? Dogs.

Dean felt his hands were tied behind him with rope, and it felt like they’d bound his ankles too. They were that afraid of him? Maybe they weren’t quite as dumb as they looked. How could they be and still be able to dress themselves, though?

What he first thought were sparks from the fire were really twinks, circling in the air currents from the flames. The wolves had cut a deal with them? How? Maybe the twinks were the werewolves of the fairies, which would make them that extra bit loathsome.

Dean looked around, and saw that Emma was laid out on the ground about ten feet away from him. Not only was she tied up as well, but she had a blindfold and a gag on her. They knew she was a witch, and must have known about her evil eye as well, because he didn’t see any point in blindfolding her otherwise.

Were they in the same place? He didn’t think so. Those sticky weeds had been replaced by a much softer bed of something that looked like ferns, but smelled vaguely of soap. In fact, the scent tickled his nose, and his hands being bound behind his back meant he couldn’t stop it. He sneezed, alerting them he was awake.

The male werewolf shifted, and looked back at him. “What kinda freak are you, boy?” he said, holding up the First Blade. “Making a knife out of bones and teeth? Kinky.”

He felt the call of the Blade, but he didn’t want to use it just yet. He had to time it just right. No need to spoil the surprise. “Working with fairies? I’d say you have me beat in the kink department.” One of the twinks zoomed in towards his face, and Dean snapped at it, almost getting it with his teeth. He bet they tasted like chicken.

“They don’t like witches, or at least these ones don’t. And what the fuck, right? Why not take some players off the board?”

“And you just had animal tranquilizers with you?”

He snorted. “Of course, dude. We make money selling club drugs.”

“We should charge y’all for them,” the woman said. She had big brown hair, like she’d teased it half to death, and warped in from a music video made in the ’80’s. The man had a lumpy dad bod and a neck beard, and looked like he could have been in any hipster band currently in the top one hundred. Dean hated pretty much all werewolves - with a notable exception or two - but he really wanted to kill this pair as slowly and horribly as possible.

“They’re shitty. I don’t feel the least bit high.”

“We didn’t want to give you too much of a thrill, just make you docile,” the man said. He put the knife down, but still had his hand on it. Dean wanted to chop it off.

“Why are we still alive?” Of course, that was the fatal mistake. A demon like him and a witch like her? You were unlikely to catch them off guard again.

“’Cause these little glowing things say we need bodies to complete the next stretch. Living bodies,” the man said, patting his girlfriend’s leg. “And ain’t neither of us gonna die here. We’re gonna get that book and see how much hell we can raise. Ain’t that right, darlin’?”

“You know it, sugar paws,” she said, giggling and leaning into him for a kiss.

Dean wished he could projectile vomit on command. They were also trying way too hard. Were they putting on this act to disgust him, to cover up one’s shocking betrayal of the other, or both? “What’s the next stretch? Human sacrifice?”

“If it was, we couldn’t use you two, could we? You’re hardly human,” the man said, and then chuckled at his own lame remark. Asshole. “I dunno. It needs lotsa blood. I guess we’re all finding out together.” He rubbed his girlfriend’s back, and asked, “You warm enough?”

“Yeah. Might as well get going. The sooner we’re out of this weird fairy hell, the better.”

Dean didn’t want to agree with big hair, but he kind of did. He wanted out of this fucking place as soon as he got his codex. Oh, and made these two look at their own intestines before they died, but that went without saying.

Dadwolf came over and picked Dean up, throwing him over his shoulder like a sack of laundry. Bound or not, he could have hurt him in a couple of different ways, and of course the Blade called to him, but he swallowed his distaste and decided to see where these assholes were taking them first. If a sacrifice was necessary for this next part, fine. He had two specimens just waiting for the chop.

Big hair went and picked up Emma, throwing her over her shoulder, and while Emma hadn’t moved, Dean was sure she was awake. She was simply waiting for an opportunity, which was smart. In cases like this, you had to pick your moment and make it count, because you usually just got the one shot. Too bad the dogs were too stupid to realize that.

Dean really didn’t appreciate the view. He could see the ground behind them, which wasn’t great for strategy, and this guy’s ass, and he had a terrible ass. You’d think wolves would get decent ones from running down prey or something, but nope. He had one of those weird butts which was kind of flat and kind of flabby at the same time. Fucking useless. Of course he couldn’t even be decent scenery. And this close, he smelled like wet dog. He was the motherfucking worst.

Finally the small ground cover ferns began to fade away, and the darkness began to turn towards light. The plants gave way to bare dirt, and then stone, as the sun came on strong, warm and bright. It was weird how all these zones, or whatever the fuck they were, came with their own lighting. Were there no suns or moons in fairy land? No wonder they were all a bunch of creeps.

Dean could hear wind, which was kind of odd, because it now struck him that he hadn’t really noticed its lack before. This whole pocket dimension was like a fever dream while you were tripping balls on acid. Almost nothing made sense.

Dadwolf dropped him on the rocky ground, with a casualness that almost hid the cruelty, and Dean was glad he wasn’t mortal, because he was sure he broke a rib on impact. From the sound, Big Hair had dumped Emma on the ground just as unceremoniously, but without the extra aggression.

They seemed, incongruously, to be on a mountain pass. Never mind that they never went up a goddamned thing. They were all on a rocky outcrop, over what seemed to be a sort of canyon. There looked to be a stone bridge about fifty feet away, hanging open as useless as a knob without a door. How was anyone supposed to reach it?

Big Hair scratched her head, and looked back at Dadwolf. “How are we supposed to do this?”

“Uh, I dunno.” He looked around, and finally one of those glowing bastard twinks showed up, flying around his head. Dean heard a much fainter version of that chiming noise again, and belatedly realized that was the twinks talking. He couldn’t make out a syllable, but the dogs with their doggy hearing just might be able to.

Dadwolf nodded along, and said to Big Hair. “Okay, we somehow gotta ... get their blood towards the bridge? That should do it.”

“And how do we do that?”

Dean had some ideas. And now that he’d freed his hands from the ropes, he had a shot at using them. Of course, the ropes around his ankles were a bitch and a half, but he’d worked around worse. He just had to figure out the timing. Well, it wouldn’t be a huge loss if Emma died right now. She’d helped, but there was no question he could do the rest of this alone.

Dadwolf started walking towards him, and Dean sat up, still pretending his hands were tied behind his back. “Can’t we talk about this?”

He shook his big, shaggy head, and chuckled. “Your luck’s run out, demon.”

Dean waited, until Dadwolf was in range, and then he fell backwards, pushed off with his hands, and basically dropkicked Dadwolf right in the stomach. He went flying backwards, off the edge of the cliff, and Dean sprung up to his feet and held out his hand. Dadwolf kept screaming, but his cry kept diminishing in a way that was kind of funny. How big was that drop? Big Hair looked at him and let out a scream that turned into a howl as she lunged for him, hands turning into claws.

The First Blade smacked into the palm of his hand, and as she neared, he slashed her throat wide open.

Blood began pouring out, and she stumbled, shocked. Dean got behind her, and turned her towards the canyon, pulling back her head to make sure blood fountained as far as it could. A bridge began materializing as the blood hit it, connecting the cliff’s edge to the rest of the bridge. Were the fairies being dramatic, and could normal water have made the bridge show up, or did it really have to be blood? No way to tell really, and it didn’t matter now regardless.

The dog went limp in his arms, and no more blood was spewing out, so Dean tossed Big Hair off the side of the cliff, and cut the ropes off his ankles. It did occur to him he could leave Emma here, or even kick her off the cliff. She’d never know, would she?

But in the end, he went over and pulled the blindfold and gag away, and cut the ropes off. “You killed them both?” she asked.

It was a stupid question, sure, but she could only hear what happened. “Yep.”

She sprung to her feet, rubbing her wrists. They looked a bit raw where she was trying to get out of her bindings. “Why do people think they can ever get the drop on you?”

“Because they’re idiots,” he said, tucking the blade in his waistband. The bridge had completely materialized now. It was made of stone, and appeared to span the canyon to the cliff on the other side, which was white like chalk, and had long, lanky trees with scaled bark, as if they were dinosaur legs. That was the tropical part of fairy land, huh?

He looked up at the sky, searching for the sun, but there was none. The sky was simply the molten gold of sunset, with no obvious source of light. Emma joined him in looking up. “God, it’s so weird here.”

“Fairies are the fucking worst.”

“You’ll get no argument from me.”

Dean stepped out on the bridge, curious to find out if it was illusion, or would collapse under weight, but it remained solid. He looked over the side, and tried to guess how far down the canyon went. One mile, two? Ridiculously far probably covered it. He saw a pale ribbon of what must have been a river down there, but despite the better light, it was hard to say.

When they were half way across, Dean decided to ask, “So this guy you want to kill, what’s his deal?”

She sighed heavily. Clearly she didn’t want to talk about it, but at this point, hadn’t he earned the story? She must have thought the same thing. “He knew I was destined to be powerful, so he groomed me, trained me, all the while planning to steal my powers from me and take them as his own.”

“What a dick. I take it he failed.”

“He did. But along the way he murdered my mother and my brother, and left me for dead. I intend to make him pay for that in blood.”

“What about your father?”

“He is my father,” she replied.

Dean laughed. Oh, there were so many shitty dads in the world, it was amazing. God was the ultimate shitty dad, wasn’t he? Or she or it. Didn’t matter. Still a shitty parent regardless of gender presentation. “Good thing you told me, ‘cause now I really wanna help you.”

“Why?”

“Fucking horrible dads are my personal forte. Hell, demons should be paying them a stipend. Do you know how many deals come down to  _my dad was a shitty person  _ ? Hell would be half-empty if men ever figured out how to parent.”

“That’s bleak as hell,” she said. “No pun intended.”

“None taken.” His first step onto the cliff on the other side confirmed that the chalky white ground beneath him was some sort of fine sand. The air also felt warmer, more humid. So this was indeed the tropical side of the street. What fucking weirdos fairies were.

“Do you think we’re the only ones left?” Emma wondered, looking around. Right now, there were no signs of others, not even fairies. The twinks fucked off as soon as they realized the wolves had lost the fight. Good riddance.

Dean shook his head. “I betcha our opponents luck ain’t that good.”

“You don’t mean ours?”

“No. We kick ass. Those poor bastards should have quit before we started.” Did that make him sound cocky? It was warranted. And they were going to win this thing, because there was no fucking way he was staying in this fucked up fairyland forever.

They entered an area where the trees were so blatantly skeletons it was kind of insulting. If only there was anyone around to blame. They were thick and chalk white, with no foliage to soften them. They were like smooth white spines rammed into the sandy earth, and at the base of their trunks, sometimes growing up into their bare white branches, were albino vines. They had triangular leaves, but they were snowy white, and had long thorns that were also white. It was like they were walking through a forest devoid of everything: life, color, point.

As they passed through, Dean heard a noise. At first he dismissed it as the wind blowing around the sand and leaves, but the second time he heard it, he realized there was no wind.

He spun on his heels, Blade in his hands, when something grabbed his leg.

Before Dean could even see what it was, he was hauled into the air. He dangled from a branch ten feet off the ground, and vines lashed out from the trees to grab him by the arms. He fought to wrest his arms away, but the vines were surprisingly strong. Like, Hulk strength. But that wasn’t the worst part.

The worst part was the thorns, which pierced flesh instantly and started sinking into his bones. He could feel them drilling into him. And the worst part was he couldn’t turn the First Blade into the vines. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Emma was in the exact same predicament as him. “Man eating fucking trees?” he exclaimed, more disgusted than anything. Leave it to fairies to set up the stupidest damn things.

  
Dean’s blood was pattering down, turning the white sand beneath him red, and he kept trying to twist around and get a better angle, but the vines seemed to be multiplying like rabbits, and getting stronger with each iteration. He gritted his teeth as he would swear he could hear his bones cracking under the thorns. Worst of all, the vines were slowly turning red, the leaves seemingly glowing plump with the crimson blush. Fucking hell, were these vampire vines?

“El fuego!” Emma shouted, and she shot out a fireball that managed to catch one of the vines holding her on fire. That eventually spread up to the branch, and the smoke that rose up had an unfortunate smell of burning hair and old cat box.

The vines burned away, and Emma was dumped unceremoniously on the ground. “Little help?” Dean asked. He still hadn’t managed to get the Blade turned to a useful angle.

Once she stood up, and brushed the sand and ashes off her, she cast the spell again, shooting a fireball from her hands. It hit the branch he was currently dangling from, and he could feel the vines loosen their grip and the thorns retract as the fire advanced. Eventually he got his wrist free enough to slash through a vine with the Blade, and he too was dumped on the ground, landing back first. Demon or not, that fucking hurt.

While the fire burnt the vines back, and singed the branches, it was hard to say much changed, except the tree now had some bits of color. Mainly blood red and char black, but hey, it helped. “Do you think these count as fairies?” Dean asked, holstering his Blade. His arms hurt, and they were speckled with blood spots where the thorns had him, but the good thing about him was he healed fast. He wanted to see your run of the mill demon do that.

She brushed the sand out of her hair. “Maybe. Who knows? Maybe this is simply where the triffids live.” Dean stared at her long enough that she scowled. “What?”

“Human Dean probably would have married you for that reference.”

She raised an eyebrow at that, and shook her head, turning away. “No wonder he’s dead.”

That was so funny, Dean almost laughed.

They walked on for a while in silence, the sky mellowing into a dark gold, and finally the landscape of man eating trees and furtive rustling that put him on edge gave way to the sound of rushing water, and a clearing.

What they found was possibly the prettiest place in all of fairyland. There was a waterfall into a tranquil blue pool, and what looked like the ruins of a temple off to the side. It had dusty brown pillars and the remains of a stone roof, collapsed inward slightly and overgrown with some type of vine like vegetation - smaller and more purple than the vampire ones - that looked like it was pulling it apart in the slowest motion possible.

The smell of water seemed odd, but in ways he couldn’t quantify until he got closer. Emma went right to the edge and paused. “We shouldn’t eat or drink anything in this realm, should we?”

“Probably not.” Spray from the waterfall hit his arm, and burned. He hissed and stepped back, looking at his forearm. It was speckled with burns, some still sizzling.

Emma jumped back. “The water’s acid?”

“It’s holy water,” he snarled. “These fucking assholes somehow have a holy waterfall. God, if only I could kill every last motherfucking one of them. I don’t suppose you have a spell that would blow this place up, do you?”

“Sorry, I didn’t specialize in demolitions.” Emma studied the ruins, but seemed reluctant to approach it. “Does this look like the boss level of a video game?”

“I hope so. They’re really pissing me off.”

Dean went ahead into the ruins, trying to be prepared for anything, which was difficult. He more or less expected giant spiders with spears, or maybe radioactive sentient dolls, but all that was inside was more rubble. The sound of running water seemed amplified, and Dean found himself gritting his teeth, anticipating pain. It wouldn’t surprise him if the culmination of this trap was flooding the place with holy water. Fucking fairies.

Emma came in, surveyed the ruins, and made a sour face that Dean felt encapsulated his feelings well. “Don’t tell me we came all this way for an anti-climax.”

“That would fit the fairies though, wouldn’t it? Make a whole bunch of beings suffer through a ridiculous landscape, only to blow their noses at the survivors. Maybe they don’t even have the codex.”

“Oh, they better fucking better. I didn’t come here with a psychopath just to be given a given a booby prize. No offense.”

“Am I supposed to be offended by the psychopath part or the booby prize part?”

“Take your pick.”

He considered it. “I don’t care.”

“See? Psychopath. But you get shit done.”

He shrugged, sure she was right, when a strange sound stopped them both cold. It was kind of a scraping sound, like rock against rock, in some dark, far off corner. Dean felt something then too - a shiver of dark magic, something thick and noxious. Had Emma felt that? She may have been a witch, but he had no idea if she was as sensitive to evil as he was. When you were a demon, it was your life’s blood. “I think -” he began, but didn’t have a chance to finish the thought, as the rug seemed to be pulled out from under his world.

_ 7 - Slow Bullet _

Dean came to, sure he was in the middle of a battle. and he jolted upright. Or at least he tried.

He was chained down to a metal bed frame. Kinky. But this wasn’t right, was it? He was sure it wasn’t, and yet it took him several moments to remember why.

Overhead was a slow turning vent fan that looked very familiar, barely pushing the warm, stale air around. He sat up carefully, sure not to dislocate his wrists or ankles, and felt the pull of something beneath him. He glanced over the edge of the thin mattress and bed frame he was currently inhabiting, and saw a huge devil’s trap drawn in red chalk on the floor, inhabiting a one foot space around the bed. Great.

It was the smell of the place - rust and old blood, flop sweat and fear - that finally clued him in to where he was. He was in Bobby’s basement “safe room”, where Sam detoxed from demon blood. Hey, hadn’t this place been burned down by Leviathans?

There were no locks for him to pick, and nothing for him to pick them with, but he wasn’t a human anymore. He started pulling against the chain, using all his strength, and he started to feel some of the links contorting, pulling away from their mates.

The door opened with a rusty creak like a scream, and the tall, gangly figure of Sam was in the doorway. “I know this isn’t real,” he said, finally breaking the chain on his right wrist. “So whatever you’re fucking here to do, do it, so I can move on.”

“I did up one of the dungeons to look like Bobby’s old place. I was hoping it would act as a trigger for Dean.”

Dean had pulled his left wrist free, and realized the ones on his ankles were going to be harder. And none of this took into consideration the devil’s trap he was caught in. Well, one problem at a time. “Yeah, whatever. Skip to the end, ‘cause I’m not buying what you’re selling.” Dean looked at the fragments of chain, and wondered if he could use these to get his ankles free.

Sam threw something at him, and suddenly Dean’s skin was burning. He snarled, having already come to hate the smell of his own singed flesh.

“This isn’t a joke,” Sam said, put the flask that held the holy water back in his pocket. “I don’t know why the fairies dropped you off, and I don’t care. My brother isn’t going to be a demon.”

“Wait - the fairies dropped me here?” Dean scoured his memories. He went into that ruin, and it was empty. There was a noise, and then ... nothing. Could they have ..?

On the one hand, this had to be part of the gauntlet. Somehow. But on the other hand, you couldn’t say the fairies wouldn’t do this, because they had a history of being just this kind of asshole. Look at the whole fake alien abduction thing they had going on. And weren’t he and Emma discussing the possibility that the fairies had led them into an anti-climactic trap? This would be the final fuck you from the little pests.

There probably never was a Blackfield Codex, or if there was, the fairies had no intention of giving it up. The whole thing was a sucker’s bet, probably entertainment for the goddamn things. He bet they were laughing their asses off the whole time.

“Do I want to know why the fairies had you?” Sam asked.

Dean frowned. “Shut up.” This couldn’t be real. It just couldn’t. He started yanking on the chains around his ankles, trying to make them break.

“There’s nowhere for you to go,” Sam said. He sounded tired, which was an odd detail. Could the fairies have been that perceptive? Because, knowing Dean’s damaged brother, he probably was wrestling with many sleepless nights while trying to find Dean, even though he told him not to. Since when did he listen to him?

While Dean worked on the chains, Sam sighed loudly, and started lighting ceremonial candles, putting them at cardinal points just beyond the trap, Dean knew the smell of them, and looked at Sam, slightly baffled. “An exorcism? Really? You do realize that I’m the only thing alive in this meat suit, right? Eject me and you get a corpse.”

“Dean would rather be a dead human than a live demon.”

Dean chuckled. “Oh sure, he said that. But you know as well as I do he didn’t mean it. No human means it.”

Sam shrugged, but didn’t verbally respond. He was continuing with his exorcism preparations. “Also, dumbass, you can’t exorcise me. The Mark of Cain keeps me locked in here. You’re going to simply annoy me and waste your time.”

Sam stared at him, his head tilted ever so slightly, like he didn’t completely understand the statement. “Do you have somewhere to be?”

Dean managed to get one foot free of the chains, and it was his turn to sigh. “Look, I know this isn’t real, but-” He felt the burn against his skin, and cringed. “Stop throwing holy water on me!”

“Did that feel real, then?”

He glared at him. The problem was, if this was a fairy - and it had to be - they had Sam down to a scary degree. He was weary and disgusted and bored and barely holding back his irritation. All of this fit what he imagined Sam would be like right now. “I get it, you’re totally emo now. Boo hoo. Move on already, My Chemical Romance.”

“If this won’t affect you either way, why do you care if I do it or not?”

“Because, demon or not, my time is still valuable. I can’t say yours is.”

There was no reaction to that from Sam. Not that he expected one, but it would have been nice to know he was bugging the shit out of him. Sam simply took an old, smelly leather book out, and started intoning Latin words at him. It sounded like the typical exorcism ritual, with some extra flourishes, but nothing to concern him.

Until it did.

Some of those words were like barbed fish hooks under his flesh, and he found himself wondering why. They couldn’t evict him, he knew that, but why did they hurt?At least the pain and irritation spurred him to breaking free of the last ankle chain, and he sat on the edge of the bed to take a breath. He didn’t want Sam to know the words were actually painful, but they were. “You’re being an idiot right now, you know that?”

Sam didn’t acknowledge him, just kept on reading. It was like he had a head full of bees, buzzing around the confines of his skull, and he didn’t like it one bit. Dean held a piece of broken chain in his hand, and wished he could get close enough to Sam to flog him with it. But that’s when an idea occurred to him.

He stood up, feeling the pull of the devil’s trap beneath him, and the words across from him, and held the small length of chain behind his back. He paced to the edge of the trap. “Are you trying to make some kind of point, asshole? I got it.” Sam continued ignoring him, which is just what he wanted.

Using the small length of chain as a whip, he caught the nearest candle, and it fell over into the trap, effectively breaking it. Before Sam could react, Dean was on him. He knocked the book from his hand and slammed him against the wall. Sam struggled, probably going for a weapon or some holy water, but Dean held his face in his hands at a painful angle, and Sam could barely move. “Too slow, Sammy. And here I thought you were supposed to be the smart one.” He then quickly twisted his hands, and Sam’s neck snapped with a sound like a gunshot. He let the body drop, and left the room.

He found himself in the familiar drab and dimly lit corridors of the bunker. So was this still a fairy hallucination somehow, or was he really back here? Now he was confused. Either way, it was a victory, because now Sam was fucking dead and off his case. Of course, the Winchesters had a terrible track record remaining dead, so he knew he couldn’t count on him being permanently gone, but hey, it was a start. He’d be willing to kill Sam a hundred times, if that’s what it took to make him stay dead.

He at least had human Dean’s memories of the place to guide him. He was in the back corridors of the “dungeon” section, which was a whole series of rooms that baffled them when they first moved into the bunker. There were maps that labeled everything, but there were a couple of different areas shown but not named. They took to calling them the dungeons, because that ‘s what they seemed to be. They were too heavy duty for storage rooms - of which there were more than enough anyway - and abutted labeled “interrogation rooms”. Of course, this bunker was put together before terms like “black sites” and “rendition” got thrown around like the latest gossip, but they assumed that was what they were for, only the supernatural variations of such. Why they didn’t write it on the map was anyone’s guess. Some weird sense of guilt?

It was only after Dean took a turn in the hall that he would have sworn was wrong did he stop and look back. Had the corridor changed? He would swear it had.

Suddenly Sam was in front of him, alive and still very bored. “Did you think it was going to be that easy, Dean?”

At least Dean now had his confirmation that this was a fairy trap. But how to get out of it? “You got me. I was half way to believing this was real.Well done.”

“This is very real, Dean. Haven’t you figured that out yet?” He reached for his holy water flask, and rather than deal with that again, Dean tackled him, laying him out on the floor, and sunk his teeth into his neck before pulling away, tearing a huge chunk of flesh and muscle out of fake Sam’s neck.

  
Blood fountained from Sam’s neck and he put a hand up to stop it, but it was like trying to stop a flood with a wall of straw. Dean straddled him as Sam looked up, eyes wide and horrified. That was exactly the reaction he’d wanted. “I wasn’t made for captivity, fairy. And having nothing to do but think up new ways to kill you will be fun for me.”

Sam tried to speak, but couldn’t, and soon the light dimmed in his eyes, as he’d lost too much blood to be functioning in any capacity. Stubbornness would only get you so far when your veins were half empty. Dean waved a sarcastic goodbye at him until he fell limp, then started searching for a way out.

Was this some kind of psychic fairy? Had to be. Otherwise how was he trapped in his own mind? That had to be the drill, right? Dean imagined that the weapons armory was around the next bend, and it was. Hallelujah.

He went inside, and started rifling - no pun intended - through the weapons. There were automatic weapons, but he wanted to get personal with most of the kills. So he took the medieval mace, the silver makhaira, a hand axe, the chainsaw. Could he imagine Dean’s car was around? It had a grenade launcher in the trunk. But, he could go to the kitchen and put together some Molotov cocktails. Burning someone alive was always fun.

When he left the armory, Sam was there, and shot him right away. He went for a gut shot, because a bullet wasn’t going to bother Dean, and shooting someone in the stomach was the most annoying shot you could make.Even though he was a demon, and that wasn’t going to kill him, he felt it.

  
Dean snarled, hand curled protectively around his stomach. “It’s funny you think you can hurt me,” Sam said. “But that’s the old can do Dean spirit, huh? Keep going until you win, or they scrape your brains off the wall.”

Dean lunged for him, but Sam fired another shot, and there was a curious blankness afterward. It was only when he came to, face down on the floor, feeling like he’d had cotton candy shoved between his ears, that he had time to ponder on what had just happened. He had to get up to his hands and knees and look around before he saw the splatter of blood on the door behind him, and put the pieces together. Sam had shot him in the head. Motherfucker. He was definitely paying that back in kind.

He collected his fallen weapons, and was kind of surprised Sam hadn’t removed them. Clearly this fairy didn’t care, and could die without actually being harmed.

Which made Dean pause. Was there no way to kill this thing? There had to be. Maybe the problem was he kept trying to kill him like he was actually Sam, and not a fairy. He had to kill this son of a bitch like he was a fairy, because he was. He left the chainsaw behind, deciding he’d use that later, and stuck with the silver knife and the iron axe. Both of these things were made to kill fairies.

“We’re not done here,” Dean snapped, heading down the corridor that should take him to the main hub. He was going to carve that motherfucking fairy a new asshole, ideally in the center of its forehead.Then maybe he’d fuck it, just for the laugh.

The corridors twisted again, and didn’t seem to be leading Dean where he wanted to go. As frustrated as he was, he was soon glad when Sam appeared in front of him. Dean didn’t hesitate this time, he immediately drove the silver knife into his chest, and slammed the axe down into the middle of his skull, cutting it in half.

  
Sam fell back and hit the floor, in a quickly growing pool of blood. “Eat that, you motherfucking fairy,” Dean said. He ripped the knife out of his chest, but left the axe where it was, because a psychic vampire like this had to be a dark fairy. Although really, in this environment, there was no way to tell.

How did he get out of this? When the fairy died, did he wake up in reality? He assumed so.

Dean found himself in the hallway that contained their respective bedrooms, Sam’s being down the corridor from Dean’s, because what were they, children? That was one of those most embarrassing things about human Dean. Everything in him screamed loner, but he was so alone when he had no one to look after. He was demented, broken in such a fundamental way that there was no healing him. Dean had no idea how the human version had managed to limp along all these years. He was so emotionally fucked it was probably generous to call him sane. Metatron did the world a favor by killing him.

When he got to Sam’s room, he had this terrible feeling in his gut. But it couldn’t be true, right? He had this sick feeling he’d open the door, and Sam would be in there. Dean walked back, and checked Dean’s room. Empty, with an empty beer bottle on the end table. The bed was made, but a bit of it was rumpled, like someone had been sitting there. Sam? Cas? Both? He wondered if that was true in the real world as well, as if this was a glimpse of Dean’s tomb.

He walked back to Sam’s room, sure he wouldn’t be there. He left him dead in the hall with a cleaved skull. But when he opened the door, Sam was sitting on the edge of his own bed, as if waiting for him. “You really haven’t figured it out yet, have you?”

Dean huffed a sigh through his nose and stormed into the room, driving the silver knife through Sam’s skull. It was hard to get a knife through bone, but with his demon strength, he managed. And he managed again and again and again, until Sam’s blood was all splattered all over the wall, and his bedspread had turned crimson. He left Sam sprawled out on the mattress, with the blade still in the soup bowl that was his skull. “Stay dead this time,” Dean snarled, slamming the door as he left.

Goddamn mind games. They were the fucking worst. He’d take the dogs and the twinks again in a heartbeat.

He finally found the main room, but when he stormed into it, he found Sam sitting at what they had called the war room table. His look of weary boredom had increased. “Do you know how many creatures I’ve met? Just like you.”

“No one’s like me,” Dean snapped. The Mark of Cain was the original bad ass motherfucker. Everyone afterward were just pale imitations.

Sam tilted his head, like he was conceding the point, but didn’t really care either way. “Not many get this far, so you should congratulate yourself for that. But you’re never getting past me.”

“Bullshit. I’ll find a way to kill you if it takes me eons.”

“It probably will. I can’t be killed. I’ve told you this several times.”

“Everything dies,” Dean said, scanning the room for a decent weapon. Maybe now was the time to go back for the chainsaw.

“Do you?” Sam replied.

The logic of that froze him in his tracks. No; the Mark of Cain was an affliction. Technically it wasn’t alive, therefore it couldn’t be said to die. “I am immortal.”

“So am I. Nice to meet you.”

For the first time, Dean didn’t know what to do. Everything died, and he was sure the fairy was saying this just to annoy him. Of course there was a way to kill it, it just wasn’t going to make it easy to figure it out. “I’m not buying this.”

Sam shrugged. “Don’t care if you are or not. Of all the psyches I’ve encountered over the centuries, yours is one of the worst.It’s just a rat’s nest of nihilism. How do you live with yourself? Is the bloodthirst a way of keeping it at bay?”

“Don’t even try to psychoanalyze me, buddy.” There was an ornamental sword by the far bookcase, right? Maybe decapitating this son of a bitch would do the job.

Over the next several ... minutes? Hours? It was hard to say. Time seemed extremely abstract here. But Dean decapitated the fairy Sam, set him on fire, chainsawed him like he was a tree, got the grenade launcher and used it, and even imagined up a wood chipper, which he threw chunks of him into like he had some dire need for bloody confetti.

And it didn’t matter.

Sam was always back, always fine, and didn’t even seem psychologically worse for wear, which was really fucking annoying. Couldn’t he at least be slightly traumatized? But he seemed to take his multiple grisly deaths in stride, as if this was just another day at the office for him. And maybe it was.

There had to be some way to get to him. Although come to think of it, not necessarily. The fairies could have made this whole contest unwinnable by design. Maybe they didn’t have the codex, or simply didn’t care to part with it.

On the off chance it was magic spells that caused his death, Dean did those too. To no effect. He had run out of ideas on how to kill this thing. Hit it with a car? Feed it to pigs? Drop it on a church spire from twenty thousand feet? There was also the fact that it might be he couldn’t die because he was controlling this mindscape - or whatever it was - and therefore nothing Dean did mattered at all. So what was he supposed to do?

He went back to Dean’s room, and started wondering if human Dean had any memories that could help him. Yes, he was a sad sack loser, more lucky than good, but he’d been monster hunting since he was a child, which was ridiculous and undoubtedly led to his broken state. But that still gave him a lot of experience in dealing with weird ass shit. He became an expert improviser, trying to keep himself and his stupid brother alive.

He did his best to imagine human Dean in this space. He closed his eyes and concentrated, until the very act of it started to make his head hurt. He opened his eyes, to find human Dean standing against the opposite wall, looking creepily lifelike. “So, hotshot, you got any bright ideas?” Demon Dean asked.

Human Dean eyed him with what could best be called lazy contempt. “I thought you were the smart one.”

“In most cases, yes. Not this one.”

Dean considered this, crossing his arms over his chest. “So this is a hunt? You’ve fought and killed fairies up to this point?”

“And a couple of werewolves, yeah.”

Dean nodded, and seemed to ponder that for a minute. “Give up.”

“What?”

“Surrender. Stop trying to kill the guy. Leave him alone.”

How could human Dean - purely dreamed up by him - be giving him attitude? “Look, I could be a bastard about this, but I’m offering you a chance to help without pulling out the knives. That can change.”

“Think about it, you stupid asshat,” human Dean snapped. “This whole thing is a fight, from step one on. These are fairies we’re dealing with. They’re perverse creatures, and not in the fun way. They just wanna fuck with everyone’s heads. After all this fighting, it would be expected that you’d have to rampage your way through here. That’s probably what everyone, up to you, has done when confronted with this. Which is why no one has moved on. It’s absolutely counterintuitive and weird to stop fighting now, but that follows fairy logic. If they could be said to have any logic. Know when to fight, and know when to give up. The whole point of this thing is probably not fighting. Like they’re trying to impart wisdom or some such shit.”

Demon Dean considered that. He might actually have a point, although he wasn’t about to admit that. “And no one’s thought about it by now?”

“Maybe there’s a time limit on this. If you haven’t figured it out by, I don’t know, sunset, or sunrise, you’re trapped. They’re anal like that.”

They were. They were also the type of assholes to tack extra rules on stuff and not tell you. “If it was that simple, why hasn’t anyone cracked it?”

Human Dean shrugged. “Because it’s fucking dumb? There’s no way you should be able to win by giving up. But I bet that gives fairies all the giggles.”

Again, as much as he hated to admit it, it fit. The fairies were just that kind of asshole. “If this doesn’t work-”

“If it doesn’t work, what exactly have you lost?” human Dean countered.

Again, another fair point. Oh god, he hated taking any advice from his pale human imitation, but he didn’t have much of a choice. In a way, he hoped he was wrong, so he didn’t have to give the dead human part a win.

Dean sat down on the bed, and decided to lay down on it. It was okay. Human Dean had some attachment to this mattress, like it was great, but all it proved was human Dean had been deprived of good sleeping places in his life. What hadn’t he been deprived of? He should have been an orphan in a Dickens novel.

Dean hadn’t been waiting for too long when Sam came in, looking at him curiously. “Were you talking to yourself? Don’t tell me you’ve snapped already.”

“Nah. I’m just done.”

“What do you mean?”

“I give up. I’m done trying to kill you.”

Sam cocked his head curiously, as if not completely trusting his ears. “You can’t give up that easily.”

Holy shit. Human Dean was right. Sam wanted him to keep fighting. “I am. No more games. You win. I’m done.”

“I thought you prided yourself on your fighting spirit.”

“I thought you wanted me to stop.”

Sam almost smirked, but managed to tamp it down. “It’s no fun if you give up now. I thought you wanted to win this thing.”

“Winning the hunt and winning against you are two different things, aren’t they?”

For no reason, except to be a dick, Sam pulled out the flask full of holy water and splashed some on him. It sizzled on his skin, and he hissed a sharp breath through his teeth, really wanting to get up and put a knife through the fucker’s face, but that was clearly what he wanted. So Dean was going to go out of his way to not do what he wanted. Never let it be said that this Dean gave the fairies anything.

He rode through his rage and the pain, and put his hands behind his head. “I give up. You win.”

“You’ll be stuck here forever.”

“I knew the terms of the contest when I joined. Take your victory.”

Sam huffed, giving him a classic bitchface, before turning to stomp off down the hall. Oh, he seriously hoped this was the right play here, otherwise he really was stuck in this fairy hell. Until Crowley came looking for him. Dean had no doubt that Crowley would be able to get the fairies to release him, because Crowley actually seemed to charm the little bastards in most circumstance.

If this wasn’t the right play, when would he know? It seemed like a good question, especially as seconds ticked away, and became minutes. Could he survive long in this fake bunker with an unkillable Sam? In theory, it was better than dealing with the twinks and the swamp fairies, but not by much.

“Turns out you were wrong, Dean,” he said. He had no idea how long it had been. but it felt like way too long. Then again, every second spent here seemed way too long. Like a personal punishment from a real dickhead god. Which was all of them, as far as he could tell.

The bed disappeared from beneath him, and he fell unceremoniously on stone. Only it wasn’t just the bed.

Dean found himself back inside the ruins. He was laying on the hard ground, with Emma laying about ten feet away, sprawled like she’d been hit in the head. He only cared if that meant there were assailants around.

He sensed no one, and the fairies hadn’t exactly been subtle, and he doubted they were going to start now. He got up carefully even so, pulling out the First Blade, trying to find movement in every dark corner.

The first thing Dean noticed was the sound of running water now seemed louder, and then he saw the far right side wall of the ruin had changed. Part of the holy waterfall was inside now, sluicing down a wall, and some of the light from outside was bleeding through ... no. No, there was something like a spotlight, highlighting something behind the water, in a nook inside the wall. He had to get closer to see what it was, but it made no sense. Was it a book? It was. A big old book.

The Codex? Holy shit - had he won? He must have. But the holy waterfall in front of it ... that had to be a final fuck you from the fairies. The little assholes.

He walked back to Emma, and nudged her shoulder with his foot. “C’mon, wake up, we won. You’re missing it.”

She didn’t respond in any way. He saw her eyes were moving rapidly behind her eyelids, and assumed the jackass fairy who had him trapped inside his own mind still had her. She hadn’t figured out the only way to win the game was not to play. Which was fucking stupid, but, fairies were fucking stupid.

He shook her harder, but still nothing. Fuck. He was really going to have to get it himself, huh? Goddamn it.

Dean tried to brace himself. He told himself mentally to just grab it and go. He’d suffered worse pain in his life. Hell, Dean’s body had muscle memories of so much pain it could’ve killed a weaker person. Gunshot wounds, bites, stabs, slashes, burns, broken bones - and he hadn’t even touched the Hell memories, which continued to echo its way through his body, even after all these years. From a psychological perspective it was kind of fascinating - as much as he tried to suppress his trauma, human Dean’s body often betrayed him. Dean had been a walking wound for years, no matter how he tried to hide it or drink it away. Probably a good thing he was rid of his body now. It wasn’t like he even took care of it.

Dean did his best. He reached for the book, and the pain was searing, like sticking his arm in a nuclear furnace. He couldn’t help but scream as his skin sizzled and popped like bacon in a hot frying pan, and once he touched the book he was barely able to hang on to it long enough to withdraw it. But he was able to get it past the waterfall before it slid from his aching fingers and hit the stone floor. Dean couldn’t help but notice the book was smoking a little too. Was it made of flesh? It wouldn’t be the first book he’d encountered bound by skin.

His arm was raw, red, and weeping where the holy water had doused him, and while being locked in by the Mark of Cain meant he healed faster than your average demon, he still had to wait for the burned skin to subside before he could use his hand.

Picking up the book, he saw the dusty, gnarled skin was indeed flesh. Not human though. He wasn’t sure what creature used to wear this hide, but clearly it was no fan of holy water either. The pages didn’t look damaged by the water, but it was fucking ancient, and by smell alone he could tell much of the ink in the book was mixed with blood and the ashes of burned humans. Nice creepy detailing, but the language was indecipherable to him. Urdu? Fuck, it could be Klingon for all he fucking knew. The most important thing was he had it now, and he wouldn’t be stuck in this fairy hell forever. Well, assuming they kept their word, which was kind of a long shot. But stranger things had happened, right?

Suddenly a light flooded the ruin, and Dean turned towards it, shading his eyes with his free hand, but it was painfully bright. He would swear he could feel the light pushing straight through his eyes like slivers. Dean gritted his teeth so hard he would have sworn he could hear them starting to crack ...

.. and as quickly as it had begun, it was over, and he found himself slammed down on sand, in an unseasonably warm place. The cry of seagulls and the heavy smell of salt and kelp let him know he was back on the Red Reach in Ensenada. “What the fucking fuck ..?” Emma cried, sitting up and looking bewildered. Oh, the fairies sent them both back. He won - since when was that fair? They did start the hunt together. The fairies probably figured they were a package deal.

She looked at him, wide eyed and lost. “What happened?”

He climbed back up to his feet and showed her the book. “We won.”

“You mean you won. How the fuck did you do that? Last I remembered, I was fighting my own Dad in our old house, and the bastard wouldn’t stay dead.”

Huh. Dean didn’t consider Sam a match for him - he hadn’t found him yet, had he? And he and Crowley had hardly been keeping a low profile - so maybe the fairies were using family members to torment them? Seemed weird. But families were hell, and fairies were hell, so he could see the reasoning.

“It was psychic torment or some such shit. Doesn’t matter” He held the book open towards her at a random page. “Can you read this crap?”

She climbed to her feet, staring at the book. She came in for a closer look, squinting at it. “Yeah, I can. Although whoever wrote this had the shittiest handwriting.”

Dean held the book out, and said, “Find the page you want.”

She gazed up at him almost suspiciously. “You’re gonna give me the page?”

“That was the deal, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s just ...” she bit her bottom lip, and Dean guessed she thought better of saying whatever she was going to say, because she rifled through the book instead, until she came to a page with what looked like a weird ass recipe on it. “This is it,” she said.

  
Dean nodded, and rearranged the book so he was only holding it one handed, while he used his free hand to rip the page out. He handed it over to her, and she seemed shocked by the whole thing. But she snatched it from his hand before he could change his mind, which was funny, because if he didn’t want to give it to her, he never would have.

She stared at the page a moment, then glanced at him nervously. She still didn’t trust him? All that meant were her survival instincts were one hundred percent spot on. “What are you going to do with the rest of the book?”

He shrugged. “Not sure yet.” He closed the book, shoved it under his arm, and started to walk away.

That Lisa Bonet fairy from the start of the game suddenly appeared in front of him, making him stop short. His guard went up, but he didn’t pull out the Blade just yet. “Congratulations,” she said, her gaze shifting from him to Emma and back. “We’ll have to think of something else for next time. Thanks for the food.” She smiled, revealing two or three dozen needle thin white teeth, too many for her to have crammed inside her mouth comfortably. But before he could process that, and how fucking gross that was, she disappeared in a flair of light.

“Oh my fucking god,” Emma exclaimed. “That was so creepy.”

“At least we now know what was in it for them.” Did they also eat their dead fairy kin? He wondered. Some of them might be perverse enough to do it. Maybe they saw it as survival of the fittest. If you were any good, you wouldn’t die in the first place.

He started off again, now hoping the fairies were done.

“Thank you,” Emma called after him.

He shrugged again. “Just upholding my end of the bargain.”

“For not killing me.”

This made him pause and smile. Did she know how close he’d come to simply offing her? He had a couple of opportunities, and he still wondered if he made the right choice. “Don’t mention it. Good luck killing your father.” In all honesty, he would have liked to help with that. Not because she needed it or even wanted it, but because the idea of putting some bastard father in the ground always made him smile. But he had other things to do.

_ 8 - The King of Pentacles _

_ _

Sam and Dean had always assumed Crowley had holdings on earth, property of all kinds, but could never quite crack his code. He didn’t put anything under his real name - he wasn’t that stupid - but they hadn’t been able to figure out his aliases.

What Dean knew now was they never would. Crowley always created a generic name, with common first and last names to the area he was in - for instance, for his holding in the Ukraine, he had a Ukrainian name, and in Spain he had a Spanish name. He could also make himself look like a local if he needed to, because he was the King of Hell and could look however the fuck he wanted, which for some reason they seemed to forget. But Crowley did foster that, by usually appearing in his regular form. As far as they knew.

For whatever reason, they seemed to think he was a defanged guard dog, a manageable puppy, which was hilarious. They thought that because he wanted them to think that. But any time he wanted to? Crowley could take them off the map. He could unleash the hordes of hell, and not even their pet angel would be able to save from the righteous flood. But Crowley was smart, and he had done the math, and figured it was better to have them in check than dead. Again. Except for now, of course.

Dean wasn’t an idiot. Of course Crowley had a little crush on him, although little was underplaying it, and in the end, meant very little to Crowley. He had a million crushes, and he would sell them all out in a heartbeat if it gained him anything, or gave him a laugh. Loyalty was not a virtue that interested him, mainly because he felt it was impossible to find, and most people simply kidded themselves. When it came down to it, no one was loyal to anyone but themselves.

So, yeah, you could say Crowley had some mommy issues. What a shock. Put it together with human Dean’s daddy issues, and you had a potent combination.

Luckily, demon Dean didn’t have those issues. Which made it kind of a drag whenever Crowley’s issues came up on their road trip. Dean needed a little room on his own to breathe, whether Crowley liked it or not. He could get a little clingy. And while the orgy in Oregon had been fun, he needed a little down time.

Right now, Crowley was chilling at his crib in Sao Paolo, an indecent but not completely obnoxious manse that looked down on rolling hills and sparkling seas, somehow avoiding the favelas where far too many people barely scraped out a short, nasty existence. Crowley occasionally did business there, but where didn’t he do business? He did most of his work in this very hilltop paradise, where wealthy people were never quite wealthy enough for their own needs. As Crowley liked to say, if it wasn’t for greed, envy, or all those other deadly sins, he wouldn’t be the man he was today.

Crowley usually stayed in Hell, sure, but there were times when he liked to, as he put it, “slum around” on Earth. The demons posing as his security staff let Dean through, because they didn’t want to die, and Crowley had probably alerted them he’d be coming. Not that he knew when that would be, but that was always the deal.For now. Dean was starting to ponder changing the deal, even though he knew Crowley would be a bitch about it. Not that that would be any sweat off his balls.

It was only just becoming dawn, and yet Crowley already had a big fire roaring in the fireplace. Dean could feel the heat of it out in the hall. As was suitable to Hell, Crowley had a tendency to like it hot.

He came in to find Crowley in his favorite crushed velvet arm chair by the fire, drinking insanely aged cognac out of an absurdly expensive crystal glass. Hell never bought the cheap version of anything. Even before Dean stepped into the range of his vision, Crowley asked, “Enjoy your vacation, Dean?”

He’d brought a backpack, and he let it fall to the floor with a sizable thud. “You left out some details, Crowley.”

He gave him a faint, smug smile. Come to think of it, all of his smiles had a tinge of smug to them. “I thought you liked a challenge.”

“I almost got trapped in that fucking fairy lunch buffet. And for what?”

“For the prize. And the joy of killing fairies.” He took a swig of his drink, and set it aside. “Since you’re here now, I assume you have it.”

“What, the Blackfield Codex?”

“Well, I didn’t mean a participation trophy.”

Dean unzipped the backpack, and pulled out the book, which smelled like cemetery dirt and beef jerky. And something else too, but he was hoping Crowley wouldn’t notice that. “You mean this?”

He sat forward, eyes sparkling. The thing about being greedy? It didn’t go away. Even when you were the King of Hell, with an army at your beck and call, and a wealth that was technically uncountable on any scale. If you were a thirsty bitch when you were alive, you remained a thirsty bitch even when you were a demon. And he should know, because human Dean’s aching pit of loneliness was carried over to him, although Dean made it go away by gorging himself on all the sex, drugs, and violence he wanted. Human Dean was still in the closet about his own desires, and basically not wanting to be a mess in front of Sam kept him to simple alcoholism, secret pill popping, and appropriate, localized violence. Which was no fun at all. “Finally,” Crowley said. He didn’t rub his hands together with glee or drool, but Dean felt he probably should have, as that was exactly the energy he was giving off. “Do you know how many demons I’ve sacrificed to those poxy fairies? I was beginning to think the codex was a myth.”

“It is now,” Dean said, lobbing the book into the fireplace. Because he’d previously doused it with kerosene, it went up like it was made of flash paper, sending a huge plume of fire and black smoke up the chimney. Maybe he used a little too much kerosene.

Crowley jumped to his feet, eyes so wide it looked like they might fall out of their sockets. “What the bloody fuck did you do that for?”

“Because I may be a demon, but I am not your bitch boy,” Dean snapped, kicking the backpack away. “I do not take orders from you. Either we are equals, or we are nothing at all.”

Crowley was so furious his eyes briefly flashed red, and the flames in the fireplace flared anew, almost bursting out of the fireplace. Although he didn’t show it often, Crowley had a bit of pyromancy in him, although usually only when he was pissed off.“I’m the King of Hell! We are not equals!”

Dean had the First Blade in his hand so fast, Crowley never even saw him pull it. “And I am the Mark of Cain! I existed before the thought of you even existed! Don’t presume to have authority over me!”

The moment seemed suspended in time. Dean had thought of a thousand ways he could kill Crowley, and he was sure Crowley had thought of a thousand ways to kill him - or at least attempt to - in kind. The fire was still raging, and now the smell of burned flesh filled the room. Dean still didn’t know what kind of skin it was.

The tension in the room then dissipated, as if an invisible switch had been flipped, and Crowley straightened his blood red tie, which never needed any straightening. “You went through all of that fairy bullshit just to throw the prize in the fire? You are one masochistic drama queen. I guess some of the human Dean Winchester is in there after all.”

“Don’t insult me,” he snapped, reluctantly holstering the Blade.

Crowley sat back down, grabbing his glass again. “At least no one else can get their hands on it.”

Dean nodded, aware there was one page still out there in the world. Emma had it. He had no idea what she would do with it after she used it. Would she burn it? Keep it in her possession? Did it even matter? He was never going to tell Crowley about it. And if she was half as smart as she thought she was, word would never get to anyone else. Not even the King of Hell.

Dean didn’t really know how much longer he was going to tolerate dragging along the boat anchor that was Crowley. But he knew if he strung him along just a little longer, kicking him to the curb would be super sweet.

He could hardly wait.


End file.
